


you should still believe in an endless world

by sodiumflare



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Multi, also poe is into both of them, also there's cuddling, and maybe-carnivorous birds, and they're into him, but this is def relationships of the traveling jacket, i don't know what else you want from me, i wasn't gonna tag this for threesome and then i gave up, so there, whatever form that takes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-05
Updated: 2016-10-05
Packaged: 2018-08-19 19:08:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8221726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sodiumflare/pseuds/sodiumflare
Summary: "Get lost," Snap had said. "Go find your strays and get out of my hair."





	

Alana was supposed to be a shiny new tech hub, allowing startup entrepreneurs lower rents, less corporate meddling, and greater opportunity for collaboration, away from the calcified systems of Coruscant - but still conveniently close to some significant metallics trade routes and a small Verpine colony on Corvus Minor.

Except that then there was that dustup with some clones, and the collapse of a thousand year-old government, and the Jedi went kaput, and then a civil war and - well, Alana's seen a few better days. Its towers have gone uninhabited, with birds on the upper floors and underbrush creeping in the foundations. Rey had carefully moved a nest of some kind, crowded with magenta eggs, to another corner of the landing pad they've chosen.

The Resistance has always gone for more subterranean options, hiding in the landscape - in the jungle-buried temples of Yavin IV of his childhood, for instance. Hoth. That insanity with the underwater base Ackbar's people had brokered a few years back. Alana breaks the mold: towers glimmering like spear tips, waves lapping at the shore. Poe feels naked, exposed - a child on a beach. Not a soldier. _The Resistance will not be intimidated_ , he'd said once. A complete lie. He's terrified all the time - it's the fuel that keeps him going, keeps him on his toes. Laughing through it all.

But he doesn't have to be afraid right now.

Snap had chased him off-duty, after he'd pulled 40 straight in the first wave out. Last time he saw Jessika, she was snoring on the floor of what'll eventually be their break room, once they get some furniture in. Right now all that's there is a kaff machine. The Resistance has its priorities.

Snap had tucked one of Thon's remaining handwoven blankets around Jessika, carefully, before kicking Poe out.

(Thon died a few months before the run on Starkiller. Stupid training accident. Nobody's fault. One of those things that happens sometimes, when you're at war.)

"Get lost," Snap had said. "Go find your strays and get out of my hair."

Finn and Rey aren't strays, exactly. They just don't have anywhere else to be, and aren't part of anything yet. Everyone knows who they are but has been too busy to know them, and in fairness, Finn was unconscious for a month after Chewie'd hauled him back from Starkiller base, and Rey'd almost immediately departed on the concluding leg of the wild broon chase that'd gotten all of them in this mess in the first place.

So Poe'd collected his strays, and the blanket Thon made him a few winters back, when they'd been on that awful ice moon for training and Poe was young and stupid and didn't have enough socks, and the bottle of Corellian brandy he'd almost forgotten was in the bottom of his locker. Finn had insisted on bringing his fruit rations, and Rey had chipped in her own - they're not very good at knowing what they're eating if it's not from a wrapper and reconstituted, these feral children, but they're enthusiastic about it.

"Where do you want to go?" he'd asked them, boots crunching broken tile in what was probably supposed to have been a lobby, a long time ago. A lot of people had had a lot of dreams for these buildings.

"Outside," Finn had said, emphatically. ("Can you imagine," the General said, face still set with grief, watching Finn help them load crate after bag after box in their hasty depature from D'Qar, inexhaustible, grinning in the sunlight, "keeping a kid like that _indoors_ all his life?")

(She had a son that died, Poe remembers sometimes.)

Rey'd lit up, a small sunrise. "Can we watch the ships coming in?"

It's a minor miracle that the turbolifts are still operational, but Rey was part of the team that patched in the generators when they arrived in the first wave, and had pronounced them sound, and that's more than enough for Poe. Finn hadn't been able to shut up about the miracles she'd worked on the Falcon, between when he woke up and she came back. They found a midlevel landing pad off one of the towers that won't be occupied until later, if it's occupied at all. The landing pad is too small for most Resistance freighters to use, anyway. For all intents and purposes, it's theirs for the moment.

The fruit is long finished, pits and cores thrown into the infinite ocean lapping at the base of their tower, and Poe's not sure how it happened, that they're curled on the blanket under a darkening sky. Open to the dawning stars, but: warm. Calm. Safe?

He's sleepier than he'd thought, although the brandy might have something to do with that. Might explain why two heads are pillowed on his stomach, too, Rey's closer to his chest, Finn's further down, his legs curled along Poe's. Rey's pointing upward, fingers stretching to the sky like a child reaching for a mobile.

Not a child, though, Poe reminds himself. The next of the Jedi, maybe. The one who might bring it all back the way it should be. The one who can keep them safe.

Finn's pointing, too, fingertip tracing rows of faraway ships drifting in from the stars, as if on the tide. Poe wonders what he thinks about them, about space. About lots of things. "What about that one?"

"Which - the one with the gold, or." He can hear the squint in Rey's voice as she peers at the rows of running lights.

"No, with the red - over by the cloud. No, that cloud."

"A Gymsnor 3 - no, a Gymsnor 2, I think. They're a little smaller. Fussy, though - must have a dedicated mechanic."

That sounds familiar. "That's gotta be Tii'a. She's got this little light freighter she's practically married to, but it breaks down every chance it gets. Delicate. It doesn't get a lot of use these days." Poe's almost sure he can tell which ship they're looking at. Maybe. There's a lot of lights up there, from the Resistance on the move.

"Can I meet her?"

Hell, Poe hasn't seen her in probably a year or two, but - "Yeah, sure. I can introduce you to Tii'a. And her ship," he adds as an afterthought, becaue Rey probably would like them both.

The head lower down his torso shifts suddenly. "Is that a - what is that?"

Poe hauls his head upward to see what Finn's looking at. "That's a bird, Finn." Some kind of seabird, probably, perched on the edge of pad, staring at Finn as Finn stares back.

"They have those here?" Finn asks.

"Yeah. They have those most places. Just not where you guys were. Alana's not real normal for a Resistance base, but as planets go, it's pretty standard. Lotsa different species can live here okay."

Long silence as Finn surveys the bird. Rey seems less interested. Maybe there were birds wherever she went, looking for Luke Skywalker.

"I can hear the waves," Rey says after a moment.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah," Rey says. "Like wind, or ships, but different. Like rocks falling, but not falling." A pause. "Breathing."

Finn's head has relaxed back onto Poe's stomach, but Poe's not putting the effort into lifting his head to see if the bird's wandered off. The bird's probably fine. The birds on Alana probably don't eat people. He can't see a bunch of tech geeks putting their playland on a planet with carnivorous birds. The towers are too graceful for that.

In any case, Finn and Rey can probably take a few birds with teeth. Poe probably won't even need to wake up.

Rey says, "Do you think we'll get to stay here long?" Oddly plaintive. Poe supposes she's tired, too. They all are. 

"I don't know," he says. "But maybe. The General's centralizing a lot of equipment and people here. Could mean that we're digging in." It would be nice to get used to a place again.

"I hope we get to stay," she says. He can't see, but he can feel her shoulder shift against his ribs and he's pretty sure she's taken Finn's hand. The running lights in the sky have thinned out a bit. He can hear the waves a little more clearly now.

"Me, too," Poe says. "Me, too."

**Author's Note:**

> I saw [this](http://sodiumflare.tumblr.com/post/151355355620/finnreyultd-the-dreamers-i-wanted-rey-and-finn) really lovely piece of fanart and started thinking. And then Poe wanted in, and weeds said it looked like Atlantis, and basically, it got away from me. Oops.
> 
> Title nicked from Mike Doughty's "Fort Hood":   
>  _I smell blood and there's no blood around_  
>  _Blanked-out eyes and the blanked-out sound_  
>  _See them coming back motionless in an airport lounge_  
>  _Let the sunshine in_  
>  _Let the sunshine in_  
>  _You should be getting stoned with a prom-dress girl_  
>  _You should still believe in an endless world_


End file.
